by April Smith
“Just got a call from L.A.” Donnato’s voice is urgent. “Where are you?” “At the hazelnut booth.” I smile at Megan. She is locking the cash box.
“We have a situation,” Donnato says. “Julius Emerson Phelps is an alias.” “That’s interesting. I can’t wait to talk to you about it.” “When the status report went to headquarters — bingo — the alias hit the computers. Julius Emerson Phelps was an infant who died of meningitis in DeKalb, Illinois, in 1949. This guy is an imposter who has taken on the name.” I watch the big man disappear down the hall. The last I heard, Ralph was asking for free counsel on his divorce.
“At this time we don’t know who Phelps really is, or why he’s living under an assumed identity. Exercise caution.” “Okay, Dad,” I say cheerfully. “See you there.”
I close the phone.
“That’s my dad. He loves hazelnut brittle. Could I get a couple of pounds?” Megan has already shouldered her handbag.
“You’re packing up,” I say apologetically, pocketing a card with the farm’s phone number.
“Chocolate or regular?”
“Regular. Thank you.”
She puts her bag down.
“I know we’re in a rush, but — sorry — would you mind wrapping it up with some ribbon?” “For a friend of the horses? Of course,” Megan says graciously, and unrolls the cellophane.
Her fingerprints will be all over it.
Nine
A weighty mist invades the city, rain without really raining, beading up in beards and hair. The deserted streets are mirrorlike and slick. We, the protesters, are staked out for the anti-BLM rally in an artsy, mixed-race neighborhood dominated by gangs; even at 2:30 in the afternoon, the place feels edgy. A dozen of us huddle in a staging area beneath the defunct neon marquee of the Excelsior Theater, a plaster-work movie castle built in the twenties, long boarded over.
Megan is on the cell, listening to Julius track the target.
“There he goes. It’s Laumann!” she reports excitedly as a burgundy government sedan sweeps by.
For a moment, we glimpse a profile of the BLM’s deputy state director, a thin fortyish white male wearing a tan raincoat — like a character actor in a supporting role, cast because his unremarkable looks will not draw attention from the leading man. But, of course, all he desires is to be the leading man, which is why he squared off with Fontana at the convention. You can see it in the tense shoulders and self-important squint, like he’s driving a vehicle of distinction, and, as the taillights flash in a spray off the road, in the decals that declare his support of the sheriff’s office, the police and fire departments.
Herbert Laumann travels in the brotherhood of heroes.
“Where’s he going?” I ask. “The school is the other way.”
“He’ll park in the red zone at the coffee place. He stops there every day, and every day he gets a refill of Irish vanilla,” Megan replies. “Then he jumps back in the car and makes it over to the school just in time to cut a few people off and get a good spot in the car-pool line.”
“You know his pattern.”
“Julius taught us to do our homework.”
“It was so easy,” mocks a young man with a long neck and heavy black-framed glasses. “Laumann always gets a refill in his Bureau of Land Management nifty commuter mug.”
Other protesters giggle and snort.
“To show he cares about the environment?”
“Because he’s such a good guy.”
I smile and nod approvingly. What a bunch of dipshits.
“What’s the plan?”
“When Julius tells us, we head up the hill. St. Luke’s is on the right. The kids will just be getting out.”
“Is there security at the school?”
“This is Portland, Darcy.”
“Okay, but what about Laumann’s son?”
“Alex?” Megan says the name as if she’s somehow claimed it.
“How’s he going to react?” I ask eagerly.
Darcy craves action. Excitement. Blood on the walls.
“Nobody wants to hurt a child, but hopefully Laumann will be so humiliated in front of his son that he’ll finally get the message.”
Her cell again. She looks up with eager eyes. “Julius is at the school. It’s a go.”
A swell of anticipation sends people rushing to their cars to retrieve homemade signs and lock up watches and rings and wallets in the unlikely event of arrest.
Laumann rolls down a fogged-up window and sets the hot coffee mug in the cup holder. He makes sure to flash the BLM logo every place he gets a refill, eager to set an example of earth-friendly recycling. As deputy state director, he is the government — not an easy role these days.
Just this week, the psychos at FAN accused him on its Web site — and it made the legitimate press — that he has been stealing the horses he’s supposed to protect. Since then, the phone and fax lines to his office have been jammed with threats of violence against anyone who supports the Wild Horse and Burro Program — including secretaries, suppliers of tack and hay, even veterinarians. He thinks he kicked that poser Bill Fontana’s ass pretty good at the animal rights convention, calling the story “a fabricated radical conspiracy,” but in truth, Herbert Laumann needs the money. His civil service pay grade is way out of line with tuition for a private Catholic school, and Laumann and his wife want the boy to have a good education, and to be safe. Even in this transitional neighborhood, where angry white youth patrol the streets, Laumann (who grew up in a farming community) believes his son is less likely to come into harm’s way than in the public schools.
St. Luke’s is on a hill, protected by wrought-iron gates — a shabby plot of dull redbrick buildings and a couple of elms. The bright spots on campus are a Romanesque Church built in 1891 and the indoor tennis courts. Laumann’s twelve-year-old son is a talented player, and St. Luke’s has a good team, which makes it almost worth the price tag. Waiting for scrawny, long-legged Alex to come through the gates in his blue plaid uniform, toting his racket in a junior varsity bag, yakking it up with scores of red-cheeked, cheerful friends, allows Laumann to believe, for fifteen minutes in the car-pool line, that his insanely overstressed, overburdened, slightly criminal life might be worth something.
Carrying signs but silent still, we reach the entrance to the school. The gates pull back automatically, right on time, and the sidewalk becomes alive with the random energy of a couple hundred bouncing children in blue plaid uniforms. The engines in the line of waiting cars fire one by one, and Laumann sits up with anticipation. They have a new baby girl at home who isn’t doing well — respiratory problems, underweight, and waking in the night. Whenever he stops moving, even for a minute, he falls into an exhausted daze. The weather is still soupy and the wipers make it worse, so Laumann hasn’t turned them on. Looking through the watery glass, he never sees us coming.
At first, we mix in with the crowd — all of us with the same greasy hair, grungy denim, and attitude as the neighborhood types. Many of us are not much older than the miscreants on the corner, or the seniors at St. Luke’s. Moving in clusters of three and four, we wave our banners: MURDERER! WE KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER!
The schoolchildren slow down.
“Save the wild horses!”
“Save our American heritage!”
Chanting in unison, we, the protesters, bulldoze through the students, whose faces have softened with confusion and fear.
My heart is beating hard. The adrenaline rush has hit both sides. Parents are getting out of cars and clogging the sidewalk. Laumann jumps into the role of deputy state director, striding through the scene with cell phone to his ear, reporting the action to 911. He has been through this before, and means to assert his authority, but then on the police recording, later, in the midst of a calm recital, you will be able to hear his naked panic: “They’re going after my son!”
Two agitators have surrounded Alex, chanting, “Your daddy kills horses!”
Alex’s blue eyes
are wide as he stares at one angry face, then another.
“Your daddy kills horses!”
Louder, closer, not giving way. One of them, a girl with a couple of nose rings, tries to force Alex to take a stuffed horse, dripping red.
Harassing a twelve-year-old was not the game plan.
Nobody wants to hurt a child.
But Darcy is committed to the cause.
“Free the horses!” I shout.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” the boy yells, and hits the girl with the nose rings in the knees with his tennis racket and keeps on swinging.
Laumann’s running through the mob, awkward in a business suit and the raincoat, face contorted with desperation, screaming at someone behind me to stop. I turn and catch sight of a streaking figure — a young man wearing a backpack and a denim jacket with neo-Nazi ornamentation. I had not seen him in the staging area under the marquee, but now he is barreling like a missile directly for Alex. POP! Like a firecracker, and the child staggers, eyes in shock, splattered with blood.
The small explosion triggers utter terror. Parents there to pick up their children find themselves grabbing them and rolling under cars, or dragging them away, running wildly.
I stay where I am for one slow-motion fraction of a second as Laumann gets to his son.
“Alex, are you shot? Show me where!” he cries, frantic hands all over the boy, who is breathing hard but standing on his feet.
“I’m okay, Dad — they didn’t do anything.”
“Didn’t do anything?”
Laumann pulls Alex — he’s walking — out of the crowd. The white shirt of his school uniform is streaked with crimson, which has grotesquely stained the sidewalk, along with Laumann’s raincoat and Alex’s pale and freckled cheeks.
“I’m o-kay!” He twists away from his father’s anxious touch. “Leave me alone! It wasn’t a gun; it’s just red paint.”
But where Laumann grew up, you slaughtered your own meat, and he knows the slippery consistency and sickly iron smell. It’s blood — real cow’s blood. Filthy, unclean putrescence, degrading innocent children.
The father’s hands become fists. “They’re dead,” Laumann vows. “They are dead. Come with me; let’s wipe this off.”
Someone has found a water bottle, and now Laumann attempts to soak a tissue and cleanse his son’s face, but his hands are shaking and the tissue dissolves.
“Dad, you have to chill,” instructs his twelve-year-old soldier.
Laumann wipes his own wet eyes and whispers hoarsely, “Where are the police?”
Ten
Waiting by the window, I keep watch for the connect. Moonlight decants through the slats of the blinds the way I remember moonlight as a child — so steady and substantial, it seemed as if you could wash your face with it, a potion of radiance that seeped through the drowsing windows of the brick house in Long Beach, penetrating the gloom of my grandfather’s world.
From Darcy’s window, I can see two girl punkers with hair like crested Gila monsters locking up the Cosmic Café. Terribly young and terribly thin, one of them is pregnant. Doo-wop resounds from the African drumming center. The girls put their arms around each other, matching steps along the darkened avenue.
The war is escalating in our little world. The techs are calling the attack on twelve-year-old Alex Laumann a “blood bomb.” The best evidence for this comes from analysis of the bloodstain patterns — the “spines” of the splatter pattern on the sidewalk and on the clothing of the victim, which tell you the amount of energy transfer. The smaller the droplets, the greater the force that projected them. The force of cow’s blood as it spat out of the backpack was created by a small amount of gunpowder, detonated by the attacker as he approached the child.
We are back to the signature device that killed Steve Crawford, which is tied to the firebomb that blew up Ernie’s Meats on the docks of Portland, and possibly other unsolved attacks over the past years credited to FAN: a fire at a genetic-engineering company that resulted in fifty thousand dollars’ worth of damage; two explosive devices using Tovex that went off at 3:00 a.m. at the construction site of a new pharmaceutical facility, destroying three concrete trucks and causing the abandonment of a twenty-million-dollar project.
Megan Tewksbury had to have known about the blood bomb and the mysterious young man, which is, finally, the best argument for infiltrating her. At last, the Operation Wildcat team agrees with what I’ve been saying all along — until we can ID the person using the alias Julius Emerson Phelps, Megan is our best way in.
A black van pulls up and double-parks in the street below, taillights blinking. Angling sideways at the window to get a better view, I see two figures emerge and open the rear doors. This is the unit I have been waiting for. I am at the door to the apartment even before there is knocking, urgent and sharp, like the Gestapo in the night.
“Darcy? Are you in there? Darcy DeGuzman! Open the door.” I unlock the door. “People are sleeping!”
Two shaggy hipsters stand in the hall. One is a white male with silver earrings and baggy India-print pants. The other is a gregarious African-American female whose long cornrows are woven with beads. Both wear heavy rubber boots. Their faces are sweaty and streaked with mud. The stench of hay and dead things is a sharp hit to the nose.
“Are you Darcy DeGuzman?”
“Who are you?”
They show their creds. FBI, Portland field office.
“We have your ducks.”
The male agent drags a plastic bin over the threshold. It contains four confused white ducks.
“I didn’t think it would be ducks.” “Those were the orders.”
“Get them out of here. I can’t deal with this.”
“We just stole ’em,” says the female. “No way we’re taking ’em back. I’m not crawling through bird poop again in this lifetime.” “Wait a minute. What’s wrong with him?” One of the ducks is lying down in the bin.
“It’s sick.”
“Why’d you take a sick one?”
“What’s the difference? They’re all gonna die.” He points to green circles drawn around their necks. “That means they’re marked for slaughter.” Okay, this is absurd.
“What am I supposed to do with a sick duck?”
The female yawns. “Call your supervisor.”
“That is incredibly unhelpful, ma’am.”
“Sorry we woke you up,” she snaps. “We enjoy doing the shit work for Los Angeles.” And they’re sure to slam the door.
Three ducks are wandering around the apartment. The worst part is, it was my dumb idea to use rescue animals in order to get closer to Megan. I was thinking more along the line of puppies, but I know why Angelo authorized the poultry heist — to make it look like the work of dedicated radicals.
To get foie gras, a gourmet pâté, you force-feed the birds until their livers swell. French farmwives have been stuffing ducks and geese for hundreds of years, but it’s not so quaint when they’re kept in electrified metal cages with tubes down their throats. Activists have long been onto it as a rallying point. Foie gras is gruesome. It’s elitist. It’s what keeps people like Megan Tewksbury up at night.
I call her at Willamette Hazelnut Farm, using the number on the card. It is five o’clock in the morning. The apartment already smells like the monkey house at the zoo.
“Friends of mine broke into a poultry farm last night—” “What friends?” Megan is on it. She must get these wake-up calls often.
“Freedom fighters, let’s just say. They had no place to take them, so they left them with me. What do I do with a bunch of ducks?” “This is not an easy time,” Megan says warily. “Are you on a cell phone?” “Yes.”
“We have to hang up.”
“Okay, but listen — here’s why I’m calling — one of the ducks is sick!” “What’s it doing?”
“Lying down. I think it’s throwing up.”
“Are there whole regurgitated kernels?”
“Seems l
ike.”
There are shifting sounds, as if she’s getting out of bed. The phone cuts out and then comes back.
“I’m very worried about this.” I can hear it in her voice. “We need to find an avian vet.” I didn’t even know such people existed. “Where?” “How soon can you get down here?”
Back in L.A., Donnato does not answer his cell. I leave a message that I am heading south with a carload of ducks.
Those patches of green I saw from the airplane turn out to be fields of rye slashed by the interstate. They claim this is the “grass-seed capital of the world,” and I can feel the pollen stinging my eyes. For another hour, there is nothing but sheep and rain. The ducks, of course, immediately climbed out of the bin and are now floating around the car like unruly balloons. One of them is flapping away in the passenger seat, and I am getting strange looks from other drivers.
As we pass a massive plywood plant, the cedary scent of sawdust fills the car, and I’m starting to feel relatively optimistic about pulling this off — until catching sight of a large mocking clown face, like the head of a court jester who failed to amuse, stuck on a pole at the entrance to an RV park.
The RV park is ominously called Thrillville.
I turn off the highway onto slick blacktop — another forty miles of vineyards and pastureland, fairgrounds and farm-equipment rentals, into the hills, past lonely ranch houses and ramparts of woods, down a couple of forking unmarked dirt roads, and finally a driveway that bumps into a shabby farmstead.
The two-story house is so deeply settled into the grassy overgrowth, it appears to have absorbed groundwater up the walls and across the roof. Brown rot grows across the siding and spreads along the junction of the gabled dormers, where old shake shingles are peeling up.
I stop the car on a patch of gravel in a light mist, wary of the country quiet. I did not imagine the place would be this isolated. The immense time and distance between here and backup is almost palpable.
The house is neglected, but the farm seems functional. There are red barnlike outbuildings and a large silver greenhouse made of inflated plastic sections, a tractor, buckets, ladders, an old steel swing set, a limp American flag on a pole stuck in a bunker of crumbling concrete.
